Last November on election night, I boarded a cross-country plane from my hometown, Los Angeles, to Boston. Up in the air, I disappeared inside two novels on my iPad, happy to be free of all distractions. That is my favorite thing about air travel: For a few hours, at least, you can exist outside of time.

When I landed, I turned on my phone and discovered that while I was floating through the sky, the country had entered a new reality. I rode to my hotel, stepped into my room, and called my mother. It was late in Massachusetts, maybe one in the morning. I felt childish for making the call, as if my mother could fix anything. But I was lonely and distraught, and besides, hadn’t she lived through worse times than this new presidency could possibly bring?

“I thought it would be better for you,” she said softly. I felt foolish for having thought the same. The street outside was dark and quiet. I stared out the window, realizing I had no idea where I was.

In 1968, the spring after she turned 20, my mother left Louisiana for a job working as a fingerprint examiner for the FBI in Washington, D.C. She had never traveled farther than Texas, but since high school, the only work she could find in her small town was cleaning houses for $5 a day. She was willing to take a chance at making a good living. She arrived with her sister, Liz, and I often picture her stepping out of Union Station like Dorothy arriving in Oz. She had been advised by relatives not to reveal that she had never been to D.C. before, lest someone try to scam her, so she and my aunt jostled together on the backseat of a cab, acting unimpressed by all the sights. Oh, just the White House? The Capitol? We’ve seen it all before. But it must have been hardest for my mother to pretend to ignore the overwhelming beauty of the fields of cherry blossoms.

She marveled at other things, too. She had never seen a black bus driver or a black policeman before. During Christmastime, she gawked at black Santa Clauses ringing bells on the streets. “Everyone was walking around with their big Afros,” she would recall. “They were proud. There was so much hope back then.”

When my mother told me stories from her childhood, about the humiliations of living under the Jim Crow laws, I always felt lucky to be alive in the present. I grew up in a suburban beach town in California. I understood the reality of racism, but I also believed in a narrative of progress. Look at my life versus my mother’s—look how far the country had come!

I never thought I’d see a black president in my lifetime, but the first time I was eligible to vote, I helped elect one. I was a freshman at Stanford then, and that night, the black students threw a party where we danced and celebrated and inserted Obama’s name into rap lyrics. Webbie’s “Independent” spelled out the president-elect’s name; the hook to “A Milli” by Lil Wayne became one long Obama chant. Through the dorm speakers, Young Jeezy rapped “My president is black, my Lambo is blue.” I fell asleep that night in a daze, the song still looping in my head.

The author with her mother. Bennett is working on a film adaptation of her novel, The Mothers.

During Trump’s first year in office, I’ve seen more of America, and more of the world, than in any other year of my life. In the final days of the presidential campaign, I went on a book tour, traveling around the country for three weeks. In Washington, D.C., I read at Politics and Prose Bookstore two hours before the final presidential debate. The morning after, during a radio interview with a British station, the interviewer asked if it was exciting being in D.C. on a debate night.

“I think we’re all just ready for this election to be over,” I said.

She sighed. “We’re ready for your election to be over, too.”

Such is the nature of Trump Time—it consumes you completely. Every time zone is located squarely within it. Last spring, I traveled to four different countries, and everywhere I went, the locals asked me about Donald Trump. At a cocktail party in Auckland, an older white man sheepishly said, “I hate to ask you this . . . ,” the way one might inquire about an embarrassing family member. In Rome, my Italian editor dismissed comparisons between Trump and Silvio Berlusconi. Bombast and misogyny aside, the difference, she said, was that her national embarrassment didn’t control the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. In Paris, I camped out in a hotel lobby for two days, fielding magazine interviews, and each time, a new journalist asked about Trump. How could he have possibly been elected?

“Racism,” I said.

But nobody wants to believe that many white voters are racist or, at the very least, tolerant enough of racism to not view it as disqualifying. Two days after the election, I read in Nashville, where I met dismayed white Hillary Clinton voters. Even living in a red state, they were shocked by the election’s outcome and, hearing my blunt diagnosis, said, “But it couldn’t be just that.” I thought about my mother, who had asked me to consider skipping that tour stop. She didn’t want me anywhere near Trump Country. The wave of racial hatred that he’d ridden to victory felt familiar and threatening to her. I told her that I would be fine, but I cried when I hung up the phone. She had gone to segregated schools, learning out of textbooks that the white schools no longer wanted. She attended Mass at a segregated church; the building was shaped like a cross, and the black parishioners had to sit in the arms so that the priest would not have to see them. My mother had already experienced so much humiliation and fear. She shouldn’t have to worry about my traveling through the South in 2016.

Soon after, I was out with a friend in Brooklyn and told her about my mother’s wariness. A white woman at the bar interrupted our conversation to tell us, “Actually, Nashville is a very progressive city.” I didn’t fully process that moment until the following morning. A white stranger, whose mother would never worry about her traveling to Tennessee because generations of her family had not been terrorized by white Southerners, jumped into my conversation to tell me that my mother’s fears were wrong. I thought about that woman during my Paris interviews, where some journalists seemed skeptical of my curt answer, and others nodded sagely, saying, “Well, race is not a problem here.” That’s the funny thing about racism. Somehow, the racists are always somewhere else.

In Trump Time, the clock moves backward. The feeling that time itself is reversing might be the most unsettling aspect of a most unsettling year. What else is Make America Great Again but a promise to re-create the past? Through his campaign slogan, Trump seizes the emotional power of nostalgia, conjuring a glorious national history and offering it as an alternative to an uncertain future. He creates a fantasy for his base of white Americans but a threat for many others. After all, in what version of the past was America ever great for my family? “The good ol’ days?” my mother always says. “The good ol’ days for who?”

Last September, I traveled with a publicist who is also black to a warehouse in Westminster, Maryland, in order to sign books. As we left Baltimore and headed toward a city that is, according to the latest census, 87 percent white, we began to see red Make America Great Again signs on lawn after lawn. “When I see those signs, I feel the same way as when I see a Confederate flag,” I said. She understood what I meant—that visceral sense of dread. Both symbols represent a racialized nostalgia that, to me, only evokes fear.

I did not realize then that, within the year, those two symbols would collapse into each other. At the Charlottesville rally to protest the removal of a Confederate monument, a young man from Ohio mowed down counterprotesters with his car, killing a young woman. Interviewed by reporters, his mother said that she didn’t know her son was attending a gathering of white supremacists. “I thought it had something to do with Trump,” she said. “Trump’s not a white supremacist.” But in the aftermath, Trump could not bring himself to denounce the white supremacists, some of whom had marched in his own name, bearing Confederate flags and wearing red Make America Great Again caps.

Trump later tweeted that you “can’t change history, but you can learn from it.” But the problem is that history isn’t neutral, nor are the lessons we glean from it. What a country chooses to enshrine reflects what it values. The Trump presidency has fixed the entire nation’s gaze in the rearview mirror, reigniting seemingly settled debates, like whether Nazis are bad people. Newspapers run splashy profiles of the alt-right, branding the same old bigotry as something hip and novel. Trump is right: You can’t change the past. You can, however, repeat it.

This summer, Representative Maxine Waters became the star of another meme after a video of a House Financial Services Committee meeting went viral. In the video, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tries to avoid her questioning by running out the clock, but Waters shuts him down, redirecting him to her question with the phrase “reclaiming my time.” She was invoking House procedural rules, but my Twitter timeline soon filled with people reclaiming their time from annoying emails, interrupting men, boring small talk, and Trump push alerts.

I love the idea of reclaiming my time because of its hopefulness and its impossibility. What better way to resist a presidency that consumes all attention, or a president hell-bent on erasing social progress, than to take back time itself? And I have tried to reclaim my time—avoiding the news until I’ve finished my morning writing, ignoring the president’s Twitter tantrums, refusing to give attention to white supremacists who so desperately want it. The function of racism is distraction, Toni Morrison said in a 1975 address at Portland State University. “It keeps you from doing your work.” She urged her audience to avoid the “deadly prison” of spending their lives trying to prove their humanity to those unwilling to see it. Throughout the year, I’ve struggled to find the balance between remaining politically engaged and rightfully outraged versus protecting my own sanity and peace. I try to resist the deadly prison. I try to do my work.

When I think about how my life has changed since last fall, part of me feels obscenely lucky. Who else, in the history of my family, could have imagined a job like mine? I spent my childhood reading, dragging my mother to the library for stacks of books I dove into before we even left the parking lot. My mother’s mother spoke French and never learned to read or write. My father’s mother, a retired schoolteacher, has started to lose her memory. When I told her I’d written a book, she said that she couldn’t wait to show it to her students. I named two characters in my book after my grandmothers—Agnes and Clarice—because I wanted to honor these two women who would never read it. I write, always thinking about the generations of black women who came before me, who faced racism and sexism head-on, and in spite of it all, did their work. They encourage me not to despair. More black women, after all, voted for Hillary Clinton than any other demographic. We have always known that moving backward was not an option. Time marches on. Not even the leader of the free world can control that.